In the Beginning Was the Sea

by Tomás Gonzáles

  4

  “THE HOUSE right opposite that island there,” said Julito.

  Elena and J. could see, not one, but three small islands lying parallel to the shore where the house was supposed to be.

  “Which one, Julito?” Elena asked.

  “The one with the palm trees, seño.”

  It was noon and the blazing sun shimmered on the dark green water. J. was wearing a white straw hat, Elena a green cap with a visor. Gannets dived into the waters near the beach and flocks of seagulls wheeled around the islands.

  As they turned into the cove, the outboard motors slowed until J. could no longer feel the forward thrust of the boat but only the rocking motion of the sea beneath them.

  The house stood on terra firma at the foot of a hill. The rear of this huge, ramshackle wooden mansion was built into the side of the hill while the front was supported on brick piles. The roof had two broad wings fanning out on either side while, at the front of the house, a third extended from three metres below the roofline to cover a wide veranda that overlooked the sea. A skylight half a metre from the gable made it seem as though there was an upper floor, but in fact there was not. All five rooms in the house were directly below the corrugated iron roof; what looked like a skylight was simply a hole that had been patched with a rusty, broken screen.

  They did not come ashore in front of the house. Julito explained that this stretch of beach was rocky and there was a risk that the boat might sink. Instead, they landed on a small beach with white sand and calm waters some two hundred metres from the house. Julito’s mate dropped over the side into water that scarcely came up to his knees and pushed the bow of the boat into the sand.

  “Best take our shoes off before we get out,” said J.

  Rolling his jeans up over his knees, J. jumped out of the boat, paddled to the shore, set down the shoes and went back to help Julito and his assistant to heave the boat ashore. “One, two, three,” called Julito, and the three men pushed. When the boat was firmly wedged in the sand, Elena jumped down onto the damp sand and quickly ran to avoid a breaking wave; once on dry land, she sat on a tree trunk and lit a cigarette. Meanwhile, J. collected their hand luggage and brought it up to the beach then went back, heaved one of the large suitcases onto his shoulder and carried it to where Elena was sitting. By the time he unloaded the second, the assistant had already brought the trunk ashore.

  “What you got in here, jefe?” he asked, “a dead body?”

  “Books,” said J. tersely.

  Under the watchful eye of Elena, the Singer sewing machine emerged from the sea feet first like a huge lobster balanced on Julito’s shoulder.

  “What do you think, Julito, will we carry the stuff up to the house?” J. asked once everything had been brought ashore.

  Julito shook his head, claiming it was getting late and the sea might be rough on the return journey. J. paid him.

  “Thank you, maestros,” he said, “have a safe trip back.”

  “The locals will help you shift your things, jefe.”

  “No problem, hermano, don’t worry. One for the road, señores?”

  The boatmen gave him a grin and each man took a deep swig. Then they pushed the boat until it floated free again.

  “Anything you need, jefe, you know the name: Julio Gutiérrez, your humble servant and friend.”

  “Why don’t you take the dregs, Julito, I wouldn’t want you to get bored on the trip back,” J. said, tossing the bottle of aguardiente which the man nimbly caught.

  The two men clambered aboard. The assistant yanked the pull start on one of the outboard motors, which began to hum gently, then he started the other. The engines rumbled as the launch roared out onto the open sea.

  “Useless bastards!” said Elena.

  “What do you want? You expect them to spend all afternoon fetching and carrying for us?”

  J. brushed the sand from his feet using his socks, then slipped on his shoes.

  “You wait here and I’ll go and find someone to give us a hand,” he said and started towards the house. Elena stood, smoking, staring out to sea and brooding furiously about the aguardiente J. had given the boatmen.

  As he walked to the house sand trickled into his shoes, so J. took them off again and padded barefoot along the beach. Waves lapped at his feet. He savoured the feeling of the water, which seemed to course through his whole body. Once he had sorted out their belongings, he thought, he might take a swim.

  “Hello!” he called, stepping into the hall.

  “Hellooo!” a woman’s voice answered from the rear of the house.

  Carrying his shoes, J. walked towards the source of the sound. At the rear of the house was a lean-to shack thatched with palm fronds. Something was boiling in a large cauldron on a wood-fired stove. J. lifted the lid and immediately dropped it, foam dripping onto the hot embers. Standing on a hotplate was a chocolate pot and a wooden pestle—a molinillo. Sitting on a stool, leaning against a pillar, her bare feet perched on the cross-piece, a black woman was breastfeeding a baby.

  “Excuse me,” said J.

  “Make yourself at home. Don’t mind me.”

  The child, a sturdy, naked little boy, nursed placidly, his buttocks cupped by one of his mamá’s broad hands, which bore a gold ring. The woman’s knees were lustrous black, well-rounded globes, though her breasts looked shrivelled. She was young. The baby’s bald head was also a plump black glossy globe.

  When J. explained who he was, the woman muttered that she had not been expecting them so soon, that Don Carlos had told them he had sold the finca to a young couple who were thinking of living here, but would probably not arrive until July.

  “Mañe!” she called, “Mañeee…!”

  There was a quick patter of footsteps on the wooden boards and a shirtless, barefoot boy of about eight suddenly appeared.

  “Go and tell your papá that Don J. has arrived! Go on, quick now!”

  The boy vanished without a word. Ten minutes later, his father arrived, accompanied by three other black men. He was short and heavy-set, with greying hair that lent him a serious, dignified air.

  “We weren’t expecting you so soon,” he said, “Gilberto Rendón, at your service.”

  J. shook his hand. He said, “Hello,” to the others and they replied.

  “I’ve got a letter in my backpack for you, Gilberto,” said J. “Our luggage is on the beach.”

  The men headed down to collect the luggage while J. sat on the veranda. Some ten metres from the house was a rocky beach where the breaking waves rattled like maracas against the rocks in a clatter of broken seashells and detritus from the coral reefs. “There must be sea urchins round here,” J. thought.

  In a small field to the left of the house facing were several mango trees, one of which was particularly tall and well proportioned. It was crowned with thick foliage and the lower branches had been pruned so cattle could graze in the shade. “It’s exactly how I pictured the tree in the Garden of Eden,” J. thought. A cow and her calf stood under the tree, sheltering from the sun. “Probably brought her in to milk her… maybe it would be better to plough up that field and plant orange trees or something. Obviously you couldn’t till the ground directly beneath the mango trees or people would trample the saplings when they came to pick mangoes. Anyway… I need to make an inventory of what’s in the house, tools and so forth.”

  He got to his feet and went back into the house.

  The whole place smelt of dust. Just below the ceiling a colony of bats fluttered. J. tried and failed to pry one of the planks from the boarded window. “I need a hammer or a crowbar,” he thought. He made a tour of the house and found a pile of wooden cot beds propped against a wall in one of the rooms. He unfolded one of them and noticed that the canvas was soiled with mouse droppings—or bat droppings. Only three of the cot beds still had their canvas attached, the others were skeletal frames.

  The floor was strewn with yellowing magazines, copies of Vanidades and Reader’s Digest
that had been gnawed by mice. There were oil burners on the window sills and the floors. In a windowless back room, he found a set of rusty spanners, three battered copper insecticide cans and various shards of plastic and lengths of wire.

  Taking one of the spanners, he headed back to the room with the cot beds.

  When he managed to pry the boards from one of the windows, the noonday sun burst into the room like an explosion. A small, iridescent lizard scuttled across the sill. The view of the sea from inside the window hit him like a punch in the gut and he felt happiness welling up inside him.

  “This will be the bedroom,” he decided and started kicking magazines and newspapers towards the door. “Though we’ll have to fumigate the whole place.”

  Meanwhile, the men arrived back with the luggage.

  “Bring the cases in here,” J. shouted from the room.

  The trunk, the sewing machine and the two suitcases were unloaded.

  “Share it between you,” J. said holding out a banknote to Gilberto.

  Without even looking at the bill, Gilberto folded it and slipped it into his shirt pocket. He was wearing red trousers, leather sandals and a faded blue shirt with the sleeves ripped off.

  “You said you had a letter from Don Carlos for me?” he enquired. J. opened one of the suitcases, took out the envelope and handed it to him. Without opening it, Gilberto folded the envelope and slipped it into the same pocket.

  Elena had not come into the house; she was sitting on the wooden steps of the veranda, staring at the sea, still fuming about the presumptuous behaviour of the two boatmen. She felt hot. Her skin was sticky and her feet swollen. She peeled off the shoes and socks she had put on in order to walk across the beach to the house. “I need to get a pair of sandals out of my suitcase,” she thought. “I’ll have a bath, put on a clean dress… This whole place needs a good scrubbing.”

  “Don Carlos said that you might be prepared to work for us,” said J.

  “Of course,” said Gilberto, “Known Don Carlos years, I have; a fine man.”

  They agreed on a salary and also agreed that J. would pay for all the necessary provisions so that Gilberto’s wife would cook for them and for her own family. This had been their arrangement with Don Carlos.

  After dark, the woman brought them dinner of black coffee, fried plantains and sea bass. J. and Elena had to sleep in separate cot beds.

  “We need to build a decent bed,” murmured J. before he fell asleep.

  He was woken at 3 a.m. by the clattering of loose tiles rattled by the wind. Half an hour later, he was sound asleep once more.

  5

  ELENA SPENT her first days at the house in a frenetic whirl of activity. As the daughter of generations of women obsessed with cleanliness, and buoyed up by the pride associated with a spotless home, the filthy, cluttered state in which Elena found the house had been oddly comforting. The day after she arrived, having swept out the room where they planned to sleep and hung the clothes in a wardrobe she had scrubbed with a scouring pad and bleach, she set to work on the bathroom and the toilet. Leaning in the doorframe, cradling the baby—who seemed permanently attached to her breasts—Gilberto’s wife watched as Elena cleared out rotted window screens, the rusted cans and lengths of pipe. The bathroom looked as though it had been used as a junk room in which to store bits and pieces—useful or otherwise—found on the two hundred hectares of the finca.

  The various objects Elena tossed out piled up at the feet of Gilberto’s wife who, still leaning in the doorway, shifted the objects with her foot so she could examine them. Then she looked at the other woman with vague curiosity.

  “What is all this shit?!” Elena muttered furiously.

  Eventually, the bathroom was clean. In the toilet stall a roll of toilet paper now hung from a length of wire, the ceilings were free of cobwebs, the floor had been swept, there was a bar of soap in the shower, two towels hung on the back of the door, and the washbasin in the corridor had been equipped with soap and a hand towel.

  At first, any progress was more apparent than actual. It was a sign of ownership rather than a real improvement, because the huge concrete cistern mounted on bricks behind the outhouses was cracked and the pipe carrying water from the stream three hundred metres away had long since rotted away.

  There was no running water. Every morning, wearing their swimsuits, Elena and J. would have to carry soap and towels down to the stream where they bathed using a gourd to scoop up water.

  “The most important thing is to get the shower working,” Elena said that first morning as she dried her feet before putting on her sandals.

  There was a constant clamour of birds down by the river and several times they spotted troops of monkeys swinging through the trees. The water was clear and soft. On the walk back, J. got into the habit of pausing for a while beneath the tall mango tree, picking a few ripe fruits and eating them as he stood in the shade watching Elena, her wet hair glistening in the sunlight, a towel in one hand and soap and shampoo in the other, walking back to the house. Even later, after they had replaced the water tank and the pipe and there was running water in the bathroom, J. went on bathing in the crystalline stream until the end.

  When Elena set about organizing the kitchen, she discovered that it was the only clean room in the house. Despite the fact the cooking was done on an open fire, the ancient pots and saucepans were gleaming and immaculate. The meagre stock of groceries was carefully arranged on shelves that were spotless, though blackened by the smoke. There was no sign of ants or cockroaches.

  “The woman certainly knows how to clean when she feels like it,” was her first impression of Gilberto’s wife.

  From the other rooms, Elena cleared out piles of dust, rats’ nests, plugs of paper that had been stuffed between the floorboards, cigarette butts and the dried corpses of cockroaches and bats.

  “When was the last time anyone swept these rooms?” she asked Gilberto’s wife.

  “December last, it would have been. Señora Clara did just what you’re doing now…”

  “And did you help her?”

  “Well, thing is, back then I’d just had the baby, see.”

  Elena quickly realized that the woman was concerned only with the kitchen, the laundry and her own house. For all she cared, everything else could crumble to dust. While Elena cleaned, the woman followed her around the house, the baby permanently clamped to her breast. More exasperated than curious, Elena tried to draw her out but the woman, though friendly enough, was not one for conversation.

  “What’s your name?” she asked as she put scraps of rotten canvas and broken plastic into a cardboard box.

  “Mercedes,” the woman answered. She smiled but did not say another word.

  Armed with a spray can and covering her face with a handkerchief, Elena completed her spring clean by fumigating the rooms with liberal quantities of insecticide.

  “Keep spraying the place with poison, and we’ll all wind up thrashing on our backs like roaches,” said J.

  Cockroaches scuttled from every corner and fell dead, making a dull thudding sound on the floorboards. Elena swept the dead bugs into a pile and proudly summoned J. so he could see them.

  “The Angel of Death is a novice compared to you,” he said.

  By the time Elena had finished, there was a mountain of rubbish piled up on the beach. That night, they lit an enormous bonfire.

  Since it would take some time for the insecticide to disperse, that night they slept out on the veranda, Elena in a cot bed and J.—hoping to avoid the repulsive twitching cockroaches—in a hammock. Elena quickly fell asleep while J. stayed awake for a while, drinking aguardiente straight from the bottle and watching the embers glow amid the darkness of the beach.

  6

  THE HOUSE was ready now: spotless, immaculate, and empty. The sewing machine stood uselessly in one of the rooms. It had been seriously damaged in the fall and its presence was more symbolic than anything else. “Leave it, when we’re next in Mede
llín we’ll get a whole new pedal drive for it,” J. said, more to placate Elena than because he genuinely thought it was important.

  Their bedroom—which had reeked of bleach and insecticide for a whole week—was now furnished with two cot beds, a wardrobe containing their clothes and the trunk full of books. A landscape painted by Elena’s brother hung on one wall, a sunset over the Andes as seen from his prison cell in Ladera, and on another was an oil painting of a woman offering herself to the sea. Two years earlier, during a drunken binge, J. had burnt his reproductions of Modigliani, Picasso and Klee and since then had rejected the notion of “good taste”, and gradually transformed his apartment in Envigado into a gallery of bad art, crude daubs depicting everyday life.

  The other bedroom, where they would later open up the shop and where, later still, the corpse would be bathed, was completely empty. J. avoided going into the room since the very emptiness brought on a feeling of vertigo. Later, abhorring the vacuum, he hung a hammock in the room that no one ever used.

  “The guest room,” Elena called it.

  J. now spent all day in shorts and sandals. He had made an inventory of the tools—he had not found much—and, accompanied by Gilberto, he had inspected the byres. Only then did he discover that, of the thirty-five head of cattle he had bought with the finca, two were dead and three had disappeared. The remainder were scrawny and infested with wood ticks. The cowsheds were crying out to be cleaned, the fences in the paddocks needed to be mended if they were to avoid more cattle straying. He asked Gilberto to repair the fences, clean out the byres and delouse the cattle.

  But Gilberto’s first task was to build a bed. For this, he used thick, rough-hewn boards he found under the veranda. The planks were long and J. said: “Make it two metres by two, Gilberto.”

  The man opened his eyes wide. In all his life he had never heard of a bed of such a size.

  The resulting bed was bigger than king-size and sturdy as a high altar. It looked like a raft with a headboard and they had to buy four single mattresses, two to cover the space and two more for height. It was not as comfortable as they had hoped since the only mattresses they could find in Turbo were hard and lumpy, but even so the bed looked impressive. The two cot beds they had slept in until the mattresses arrived looked like flimsy sailboats next to this transatlantic liner.